The Iranian Sociological Association and the Institutionalization of Non-Institutionalization

Sociology entered Iran’s higher education landscape via the establishment of the University of Tehran in 1934, where Gholamhossein Sadighi, a Sorbonne graduate, began teaching the discipline in 1940. In its formative decades, sociology in Iran was a small and elite field, shaped by French intellectual influences and tethered to the modernist nation-building project of the Pahlavi state. It remained a discipline cultivated largely within Tehran’s academic elite, with limited institutional reach and a narrow professional community.

The 1979 Revolution and the subsequent Cultural Revolution of 1980–1983 brought both rupture and expansion. The new Islamic Republic radically restructured the university system, expelling faculty deemed ideologically suspect, closing universities for reorganization, and embedding ideological vetting into every stage of academic life. Sociology – like other social sciences – was subjected to intense scrutiny, with entire intellectual currents purged and syllabi rewritten to reflect Islamic and revolutionary values.

Paradoxically, the post-war period of reconstruction following the end of the Iran–Iraq War in the late 1980s and 1990s saw a rapid expansion of higher education and a dramatic increase in sociology enrollments. The field’s institutional growth, however, was deeply embedded in the rentier state’s bureaucratic and ideological apparatus. Academic promotions, research funding, and departmental appointments were governed less by intellectual autonomy or scholarly merit than by political loyalty, personal networks, and bureaucratic compliance. While the sheer number of sociology departments and students increased, the quality of intellectual life was shaped by the tension between formal expansion and the constraints of ideological control.

A varied bureaucratically compliant mainstream and a diverse academic periphery

Within this post-revolutionary landscape, Iranian sociology became increasingly differentiated. The interplay of ideological screening, bureaucratic formalism, and the prestige economy of the rentier university produced a profession in which scholars occupied different – and sometimes sharply divergent – positions. Some entered the field through rentier channels tied to formal ideology, leveraging political loyalty into managerial positions within oligarchic academic networks. Others, less ideologically committed, nonetheless assumed bureaucratic roles out of pragmatic interest, seeking security and advancement within the system’s existing rules.

There were also staunch ideologues – whether religious, leftist, or nationalist – who positioned themselves outside the university mainstream, focusing on political assertion rather than sustained empirical inquiry. Beyond the academic core, independent researchers, many of them expelled in the purges of the 1980s, continued to produce works of lasting intellectual value despite lacking formal affiliations.

The “university periphery” included those employed in research institutes or scientific bodies, who often engaged broader audiences through public lectures, publications, and online forums. A younger cohort of extra-university scholars emerged as well – some excluded from academia by regulation, others avoiding it by choice – who remained in dialogue with critical global intellectual currents. The Iranian diaspora encompassed two distinct groups: those trained in Iran but unable to return due to political prohibitions, and those born or raised abroad whose scholarship nonetheless engaged deeply with Iranian society. Finally, there were “identity seekers”: graduates for whom sociology served less as a sustained intellectual vocation than as a means of personal or symbolic affiliation, offering recognition, status, or a sense of belonging rather than ongoing scholarly contribution.

Legacies

This layered and fragmented professional terrain predated the formation of the Iranian Sociological Association but decisively shaped its culture and internal politics. The coexistence of such diverse orientations ranging from bureaucratic loyalty to radical independence, from global intellectual engagement to purely personal identification, ensured that the Iranian Sociological Association’s institutional life would be characterized by both pluralism and tension.

These legacies set the stage for what might be called the institutionalization of non-institutionalization: a professional culture where the appearance of scholarly vitality often outweighs the substantive production of knowledge.

Between form and substance

Measured against formal benchmarks, the Iranian Sociological Association has made visible strides toward institutionalization: it has grown in membership, expanded its annual conference, and increased its visibility within public debates. The original and decisive step toward formal professional organization had been taken in 1991, when seventeen Iranian sociologists, largely trained in Europe and the United States, founded the Iranian Sociological Association. During its formative phase, the Iranian Association developed a more structured internal organization. In addition to administrative functions, such as the evolving organization of its conferences and publications, it created working groups aligned with various subfields of sociology. Yet many of these groups have operated without a clearly defined focus or set of objectives.

What emerges here is a paradox that can be described as the institutionalization of non-institutionalization. Scientific associations often operate in ways that privilege form over substance: the performance of knowledge production through conferences, workshops, and meetings becomes the very measure of legitimacy, while the actual generation of new insights remains secondary. In this sense, heteronomy takes shape not only via dependence on external forces but also in the routinization of practices that simulate intellectual labor without necessarily producing tangible fruit.

Consolidation followed by the entrenchment of convention

The years between 2000 and 2015 were a period of relative stability and consolidation, during which the Iranian Sociological Association acquired academic and social credibility. But the subsequent years brought a generational overhaul: during this period, many senior scholars stepped back from active participation, and newer entrants – often navigating a constrained academic environment – faced fewer avenues for systematic training and integration into professional networks. While quantitative growth continued, the association’s intellectual core weakened. The institutional norms and routines established during the stabilization period became entrenched, forming an identity that had once been effective but has since grown resistant to change.

The Iranian Sociological Association’s early organizational blueprint rested less on explicit planning than on tacit knowledge: the informal habits and assumptions of its founding members. Rather than developing structures tailored to Iranian realities, it largely copied the outward form of professional associations in Europe and the United States. This emulation gave the association the appearance of formal organization, but without the reflective adaptation or codified rules that could anchor a durable institutional identity. As a result, the association lacks foundational documents articulating its intellectual mission, ethical and scientific codes, or long-term vision. Debates on central issues for scholarly life – such as democracy, associational ethics, or the division of labor between working groups – remain underdeveloped.

The absence of codified norms has left the Iranian Sociological Association operating based on uncodified conventions and personalized decision-making. It is less a modern institution than a hybrid: formally organized but lacking the reflexive self-understanding that institutional durability requires. This “non-institutionalization within institutionalization” is visible in its democratic processes: members rarely engage in substantive deliberation about the association’s direction, and the Iranian Sociological Association is not widely recognized by its own members as a shared intellectual and organizational project.

Prestige outweighs intellectual rigor and responsibility

At the same time, the association’s internal life has been shaped by paradoxes. The Iranian Sociological Association reproduces the outward rituals of organizational life – conferences, elections, publications – without fully realizing the substantive goals of a scholarly association. Instead of fostering robust intellectual contestation around theories, methods, or research priorities, its competitive energies often gravitate toward questions of prestige, visibility, and identity. Activist and identity-seeking impulses have grown more visible in recent years, and while they have expanded the Association’s public profile, they have sometimes overshadowed the task of building durable institutional capacity.

These dynamics play out across three intersecting axes of competition: ideological, prestige-based, and institutional. Ideological divides, once muted by the relative homogeneity of the early membership, have become more pronounced, often intersecting with activism and identity politics. Prestige-based competition reflects the broader academic culture in Iran, where leadership positions are sought more for symbolic capital than for intellectual responsibility. The institutional axis, meanwhile, remains underdeveloped: despite seminars and conferences, the Iranian Sociological Association shows little evidence of scientific competition – debates over theories, methodologies, or research agendas – that could drive the consolidation of a robust scholarly community.

These patterns are not simply internal but are reinforced by structural weaknesses in Iran’s university system itself: uneven academic preparation before the presence of the association, limited mentoring within universities, and the dominance of rentier logics and oligarchic academic cliques. Taken together, they illuminate the paradox of an association that is formally present, publicly visible, and quantitatively expanding, yet still struggling to consolidate a durable intellectual and institutional foundation, leaving its future trajectory an open question.

Future prospects

Amid the Iranian Sociological Association’s institutional ambiguities, opportunities for transformation are beginning to surface. A small but growing cohort of critical scholars, often lacking the privileges of earlier generations, engages deeply with global critical thought, resists identity-driven prestige-seeking, and strives to construct scholarly selves independent of prevailing hegemonies. Their commitments, rooted in democratic practice, intellectual pluralism, and institutional reflexivity, remain marginal within the Association’s dominant culture but nonetheless signal possible avenues of renewal.

For such currents to consolidate, several interdependent pillars are essential: democracy, to channel heterogeneity into deliberation rather than factionalism; pluralism, to ensure working groups reflect diverse orientations; operational autonomy, to allow those groups to set substantive agendas; and the continuity of periodic conferences, oriented around problem-centered research rather than identity-driven or prestige-based agendas. The gradual shift toward more problem-oriented conference papers suggests an opening for such change, with the potential to foster collaborations that extend beyond the event itself.

The challenge ahead

The Iranian Sociological Association today reflects layered legacies: the elitist and foreign-influenced sociology of the pre-revolutionary period; the ideological ruptures and purges of the 1980s; the rentier-bureaucratic expansion of the post-war decades; and the increasingly fragmented intellectual culture of the present. This history has left the Iranian Sociological Association with both vitality and volatility: a broad membership base spanning bureaucratic loyalists, independent intellectuals, and globally engaged critical scholars, but without a codified self-understanding or culture of sustained democratic debate.

The challenge ahead is not numerical growth or public visibility, but the cultivation of habits, norms, and structures that enable the association to become more than the sum of its factions. In other words, the task is to move beyond the paradox of form without substance: to turn performance into practice, and appearance into genuine scholarly production. If the Iranian Sociological Association can anchor itself in pluralism, democratic deliberation, and intellectual autonomy, it might yet turn its heterogeneity into a source of collective strength. Without such a shift, it risks remaining an association in form but not in substance: an institution with the appearance of cohesion but the reality of fragmentation. The trajectory it chooses will define the next chapter of sociology’s collective life in Iran.

Esmail Khalili, former faculty member of the Institute for Civilizational and Socio-Cultural Studies, and Vice-President of the Iranian Sociological Association (2021-25), Iran <esmaeil.khalili@gmail.com>